Ruby Roth's Mothers Day Message

Happy, happy Mother's Day to all of you mamas (whether to kids or kittens) for you enduring love, which reproduces the day, every day, for those who depend on you.

Now, I know…flowers are dandy, but you’d prefer a revolution. I’m with you. In that spirit, here are some radical thoughts...

A mother cow carries her baby for 285 days—that's even longer than the long human gestation period of 260 days. On Sunday, when we celebrate the mother archetype—the nurturer, the maker, the mender, the powerful and loving source of life—let's hold a thought for the 9+ million dairy cows in the U.S., whose sole existence—creation, birth, and death—is premeditated for the purpose of extracting fluid from their postpartum bodies.

Imagine the life force it takes for a cow to produce an 80-pound baby in nearly the same amount of time it takes us to produce a 7.5-pound child. Imagine being repeatedly impregnated for the entirety of your adolescent and adult life; consider the chemical load that makes you produce twice the amount of milk a cow did 40 years ago. Your babies disappear, your milk is extracted by man or machine and then, whether you've lived on a grassy field or in a dark shed, you’ll be slaughtered once you're spent.

These mothers endure an existence not unlike the one from which Ohio kidnap victims Amanda Berry, Gina De Jesus, and Michelle Knight just escaped.

Chains, ropes, life indoors, deprivation, isolation, rape, multiple pregnancies, fear, and beatdowns—as the facts emerge on the news, the nauseating descriptions are familiar—in a different context, they are the reasons we're vegan.

If you’ve not yet gone vegan, Mother’s Day 2014 might be a great one-year anniversary to celebrate the day you did.

Take a deep breath! Forgive yourself any regrets and focus on the present and future. Mamas, have a dinner prepared by someone else. See the mess in your house as a happy sign that your loved ones are alive and within reach. Celebrate that your passion and love raises each new generation to do better than the last.

Now please take action and share. Copy and paste any of the following to Twitter (or @ That's Why We Don't Eat Animals on FB):